CHAPTER THREE The Photograph
They stepped into the cramped courtyard that passed for a playground. The woman seemed to forget Sophie immediately. She took off her sunglasses, opened her bag, and got out a pack of cigarettes. The box had a large red heart on it, and the word Kiss.
“Oh, but you can’t smoke!” Sophie gasped.
The woman’s enormous blue eyes opened even wider.
Sophie said, “Not on school premises. It’s against the rules.” Had the woman heard her? Understood her? She had already put a cigarette in her mouth.
“We are outside!” she pronounced. “In fresh air! I need cigarette!” But after a second, she took it out of her mouth, unlit.
Sophie looked around the dismal yard. What could she say about it?
Valerian was growing out of the brickwork, and the paint on the window ledges was flaking.
The pavement seemed to sweat. The presence of such an exotic, glamorous creature against this drab background made the school seem even more inhospitable than usual.
“So,” Sophie started, “this is our playground. The science labs …”
The woman wasn’t listening. She was rummaging in her handbag again. “I take photograph!” she said, lifting a small camera to her face.
“I think that’s against the rules as well …” Sophie blushed.
“To show my daughter. In Saint Petersburg.”
“You are from Russia?” Sophie blurted out.
Of course! She should have known! The woman’s voice, her scarf, her charm, set her apart.
Her father had always said it was the most romantic country on earth.
And anyone could see that the woman in front of her could not have wandered in from some sorry old corner of England.
She could only have stepped out of a land of palaces and poetry.
Flash!
“Turn your head to side!”
Sophie, startled, did as she was told.
Flash!
“How old is your daughter?” Sophie asked.
The woman waved her hand dismissively. “Ten … eleven, maybe. Natalya very clever. All her teachers tell me they are blessed to have such clever child in their class. She can do any sums!” The woman snapped her fingers. “Like that! In head!”
Sophie wondered what such a mathematical prodigy would make of Mr. Webb, the school’s only math teacher, who had taken to talking about the insanity of numbers and how they persecuted him.
The woman rearranged her silk scarf so that the oversized designer logo was more apparent. “I tell them it is because I prepare all her food. Finest food. From import. All organeek!” She glanced up at the sky. “Now it will rain. I do not like rain.”
“Well, maybe the science labs —” Sophie began, though the rain had stopped and didn’t look like it was starting again.
“I do not like science labs. I must speak with nice English man. Oooocheeetel. This is word for teacher in my language.” The way she pursed her lips as she said the word made it sound like a more fascinating job than Sophie could ever have imagined, possibly than Mr. Tweedie could ever have imagined.
“But first … leep-steek! Take me somewhere I can make beauty face.” She puckered up her mouth, and gave Sophie a sly look. “You have room where sleep?”
Ten minutes later, Sophie was still waiting outside her own room. The woman seemed to be taking rather a long time just to apply some lipstick. Eventually, she emerged in a storm cloud of scent and with a determined air.
“Photograph at window,” she said. “Is your father?”
“Yes …” Sophie said cautiously. But why, she thought, had the woman been looking around the room rather than at her own face in the mirror?
“He lives abroad?”
Something in her voice made Sophie reluctant to answer. She hated questions about her father, but the woman’s direct, uncaring tone made it even worse.
“No. He’s …” She hesitated.
“Dead?”
Sophie nodded.
But why did that make the woman smile? Without another word, she turned and sashayed off down the corridor. She did not ask Sophie to follow her.
She had looked, Sophie thought uneasily, almost triumphant.
Sophie paid no attention in French. The dream of her father and the winter forest, the holes in her sweater that had caught Mr. Tweedie’s eye, the strange Russian woman …
the day was beginning to feel unreal. The assistante warbled on, but Sophie stared out of the window, trying to turn the wet London plane trees into a forest coated in snow.
If only she could have gone to Saint Petersburg!
She stared hard at a couple of Japanese tourists, dressed in leg warmers and trench coats, with manga-style spiked hair, and half closed her eyes to see if she could get them to become duelists, meeting in the half-light of dawn.
Perhaps the taller one could be a poet, if she imagined him with a hat to cover the pink streaks in his hair.
And the other one could be a lieutenant, and they had quarreled over a game of cards …
no … the taller one had stolen the other’s stallion and ridden it until it was lame …
“Sophie Smith!”
She jumped. “Yes? Sorry, I mean, Oui?”
Someone behind her laughed. She looked at the board.
It had become quite full of new vocabulary since she had started staring out of the window.
Mademoiselle Deguignet asked her a question.
From the tone of her voice, it sounded like it wasn’t the first time she’d asked it.
Marianne turned around and mouthed something: the answer, most likely, but despite Marianne’s best efforts Sophie could not work out what she was saying.
At that moment, Mrs. Hingley, the school secretary, entered the room.
She was at her most officious, her dumpy frame outlined by a too-tight sweater and skirt, her mean little mouth made to seem even smaller and meaner by her shocking pink lipstick.
She had a short conversation with Mademoiselle Deguignet, stared at Sophie with scarcely disguised suspicion, then stomped out again.
“It seems you are required in the headmistress’s office, Sophie.” The assistante looked surprised.
Sophie heard her chair scrape far too loudly as she stood up.
Mademoiselle Deguignet winced and the laughter broke out again.
This must have to do with the sweater. How she wished she had looked for one in Lost and Found before breakfast!
She’d had no time since then — and now she had to face Mrs. Sharman again.
Sophie left the classroom and walked as slowly as possible toward the office. She felt sick.
“Sophie!” She turned to see Delphine running toward her.
“What are you doing?”
“I told Mademoiselle Deguignet I needed to go to the loo …” Delphine pulled off her sweater and handed it to Sophie. “Quick. Swap! Mrs. Sharman will have a fit if she sees you in that old thing again.”
Gratefully, Sophie pulled off her sweater and handed it to Delphine, who knotted it around her shoulders: It made her look chic and hid the worst of the holes.
“Bonne chance,” her friend whispered.
Sophie knocked on the secretary’s door. Her pulse was racing and she knew her cheeks were red. She licked her lips nervously and put her head around the door when she was told to enter. Mrs. Hingley’s Jack Russell terrier, in his basket under the desk, started to growl.
Mrs. Hingley directed Sophie into Mrs. Sharman’s office with a grumpy nod.
The headmistress was checking figures on a spreadsheet. Her glasses rested halfway down her nose. Without looking up, she said, “I’ve just called your guardian, but she’s not at any of the numbers we have in your file. Do you happen to know where she might be?”
Sophie stood in the middle of the office. She was quite a long way from the desk, but felt it would be inappropriate to advance any farther. Where was Rosemary, exactly? She had a feeling March was the month she went to Majorca to play bridge.
Mrs. Sharman sighed and looked up. “What exactly did you do today, Sophie?” she asked.
“Er …” Sophie began.
Mrs. Sharman frowned. “When you took the visitor into the playground? Did you say something to her?”
“I told her she couldn’t smoke,” Sophie said.
Mrs. Sharman shook her head. “Anything else?”
Sophie pulled at the sleeve of Delphine’s sweater. Much softer than hers. Probably cashmere. “I don’t think so.”
“Unbelievable,” Mrs. Sharman said under her breath.
She stood up. “Well, whatever you did, our extremely wealthy visitor from Saint Petersburg is convinced that you” — and here she shot Sophie a look of utter disbelief — “would be able to persuade her friends to send their daughters here. Apparently, her friends are very wealthy, too.” Mrs. Sharman took off her glasses.
“She asked a lot of questions about you; she seemed to be interested — pleased, even! — to know just how poor you are!” Mrs. Sharman shook her head as if nonplussed.
“I began to wonder if she hadn’t understood what I was saying!
However, against my better judgment, I am going to send you on the trip to Saint Petersburg, Sophie Smith. ”
Sophie stood very still, not daring to breathe. Had she heard correctly? She balled her fists and dug her fingers into her palms.
“Of course,” Mrs. Sharman went on, “I think the woman is quite wrong — which is why I will also send Marianne and Delphine. They are the sort of girls who show the benefit of a New Bloomsbury College education!”
On the way back to French, Sophie allowed herself several footsteps to savor the thought that, for the first and only time in her life, something wonderful and magical had happened. Then she sighed.
There was just one problem. A big one.
Rosemary.